Every field has enthusiasts – the users that obsess over the smallest details to get the best, to be the best, and excel in their field. For technology the most recognizable fields are in audio and video, where enthusiasts will spend upwards of a hundred thousand monies to kit out their home studio/cinema with the correct equipment to get the best experience. There is also an element of competitiveness between enthusiasts to own or create the best. This could be extended to PC chassis modifications, which can get rather elaborate and end up competing for prize money. Well it turns out you can be a PC enthusiast as well, where the only thing matters is speed. This is the art of the competitive overclocker.

Overclocking has been a part of reviews at AnandTech almost since the beginning – the ability to run the hardware faster than rated for an extra level of performance in day-to-day tasks, gaming, or high throughput tasks. In recent CPU generations it was a common time to find a user who had taken their 2.4 GHz processor and overclocked it to 3.2 GHz processor, and thus getting the performance of the higher class component for a large monetary saving. In the recent generation of Intel processors, the –K skews are designed specifically for overclocking, and AMD processors are always welcome for a few extra MHz.

Competitive overclockers take the whole game a stage further. For this group of people, no speed is fast enough. They are not after a 24/7 stable result, it has to be quick enough to run a benchmark (to verify the speed). As a result the equipment used can go way beyond the standard PC hardware – examining data sheets to modify the circuit boards to deliver extra power is not an uncommon sight in the higher echelons of the community. If this allows them to squeeze an extra 0.01% over someone else, then it will be done.